As is well known and understood, removable, hard drive computer systems employ a single drive housing with its own read-right heads, to accept numerous removable cartridges--each containing its own new disk--, thereby saving money through the reuse of the mechanical aspects of a hard drive. As is also well known and understood, two types of hard drive systems are available--one, in which the platter and heads are sealed in an airtight chassis, and the other, in which the cartridges have a shutter which must open inside the drive to admit the read-right heads. As has been determined, this second version has been found to allow dust to enter the cartridge during periods of normal use, and has been noted to produce bad sectors on the platter, to create read and write errors, and even to result in head crashes.
As will additionally be appreciated by those skilled in the art, computer data is a very time consuming and costly thing to lose. If the cartridge were to become contaminated, it is obvious that data will be lost, and thousands of dollars can easily be spent in lost data and/or man-hours required to reenter that data which was in fact lost. Clearly, if contamination were found to be at a high enough level, the cartridge itself could very easily have to be replaced--and, in a worst-case scenario, a resultant head crash could cause the hard drive itself to be damaged. This is especially so as operators continue to use the cartridge over-and-over again, even where it is intended to back up cartridges in an attempt to make the system secure.